Big phone, small tablet or in-between 'phablet'? It's a question that gets less and less important the more you get to grips with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. With its whopping 5.5in display it gives you more screen real estate than even Samsung's own Galaxy S3 or the HTC One X and the kind of Web-browsing, game-playing, video-watching usability you'd expect from a 7in tablet. Yet it's still (just about) small enough to wedge in a jacket pocket. Throw in Samsung's S-Pen technology, and you have a device that won't suit some users, but will prove indispensable to others. Most of all, it's still a device unlike any other.
Design
There's no getting away from the fact that the Galaxy Note 2 is big. Measuring 151 x 80.5 x 9.4mm, it's slightly wider and taller (though a little thinner) than the original Note, and over a centimetre wider and taller than the Galaxy S3 – hardly the least obtrusive phone itself. You do feel a bit silly holding the thing up to your ear while making or taking calls, and even if you could cram it into your jeans pocket, you wouldn't look or feel comfortable walking around with it in there.
Get over the size, however, and it's surprising how light and comfortable the Galaxy Note 2 feels. Despite the flexible, strip-away plastic back it never feels lightweight or plasticky, it's all nicely curved for the hand, and the metallic edge gives it extra weight and substance. It's a good-looking, robust-feeling device.
Controls and connections are all in place, but discrete. There's a volume rocker on the left-hand-edge, a power button on the right and a standard micro USB port at the bottom. The only control button on the front is a single pill-shaped home button, with touch-sensitive menu and back buttons to the left and right that only light up when activated. To find the micro SIM card slot and micro SD card slot, you have to peel away the back, also allowing you to get at and replace the battery. The Note 2 ships in 16, 32 and 64GB variations, but it's always good to be able to upgrade it with a micro SDXC card, and you don't need to remove the battery to get at it either.
Screen
While it won't be challenging the iPhone 5 in the pixel density stakes, the 5.5in AMOLED screen is a beauty. The 1,280 x 720 pixel resolution is actually lower than the 1,280 x 800 resolution of the original Note, but there's compensation in the fact that there's no pentile sub-pixel arrangement here, making everything look that little bit sharper. It's a fantastically bright, fantastically clear screen, and if the colours sometimes look a little too vibrant, at least they're consistently punchy and always hold up well, no matter what the lighting. If you're playing games, browsing photo albums or watching movies, then this is a brilliant device to do so on, offering a bigger screen experience than any normal smartphone, but without the added size and weight of a tablet.
Of course, there are a few more questions when it comes to apps or browsing the Web; with the same resolution as the Galaxy S3, does the bigger screen of the Note 2 actually bring any benefits? On balance, we'd say so. It's just that bit easier to read text without zooming in to the same degree, or to navigate around a page without prodding the wrong bit. The Note 2 also works better as an eBook reader, because you can see more text without decreasing the font size to the point of being illegible.
Overall, that larger screen helps make the Note 2 an incredibly versatile device.
Sound is another strength. While we've heard some 7in tablets deliver more powerful and better-rounded sound, the Note 2 fares better than most smartphones while watching films or playing games. Call quality is good, and the Note 2 works well to record voices or double up as a speakerphone. Samsung also gets kudos for shipping a half-decent pair of in-ear headphones in the box. They won't stand up to a set of budget IEMs from Shure or Klipsch, but when combined with Samsung's music player app and its SoundAlive EQ technology, you can get some very listenable results.
S-Pen Stylus
The reason the original Note caught the public imagination was its S-Pen stylus, which transformed the device from an oddball smartphone/tablet into something people wanted to work and play with. It all comes down to a combination of software and hardware, with Wacom providing digitiser technology to recognise the proximity of the stylus and sense the pressure with which it's being applied (with support for up to 1,024 levels), while Samsung has provided software to harness these features to useful effect.
The stylus now resides in a slot at the bottom of the device, and it's a slim but very manageable effort with a nice, rounded profile. The Note 2 actively recognises when you've pulled the stylus from its sheath and takes you to a gallery of templates for the S Note note-taking app, where you can doodle, list or annotate to your heart's content.
The app has some very smart handwriting recognition technology built in, which did an impressive job of converting the scrawl that once appalled my teachers into normal text (albeit with the assistance of some heavy autocorrect), and while you couldn't mistake S Note for an art package, there are enough line and colour options to keep most doodlers busy in their next endless meeting. There's also a neat screen recorder function, so that you can watch your notes and annotations appearing later in the order that you added them.
But the functionality doesn't end there. Open up the S-Planner calendar app and you can hover the pen over an event to see more detailed information, and there's a similar preview feature in the email application. Hold the button on the pen down while you have another app open, and you get a screenshot you can annotate using S-Note's tools before saving it to use or email later.
Beyond this, Samsung also includes an entertaining little app called Paper Artist, which enables you to take a photo or open up a new one then add a range of artistic filters locally using finger or stylus, with the effects happening as you watch in real time. I'd be hard pressed to say that it did anything useful or even that artistic, but it's fun – and the Note 2 isn't all about hard work by any means.
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